Kant’s most important successor, G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), attempted to transcend systematically all the antinomies of Kantian thought—noumenon and phenomenon, freedom and necessity, subject and object. Whereas Kant had claimed that humans could aspire only to knowledge of phenomena, Hegel set out to prove that, as in the metaphysics of old, reason was in fact capable of an “absolute knowledge” that penetrated into essences, or things-in-themselves. For Kant the ideas of pure reason possessed merely a noumenal status: they could serve as regulative ideals for human thought or achievement, yet, insofar as they transcended the bounds of experience, they could never be verified or redeemed by the understanding.

In Hegel’s thought the limitations to knowledge repeatedly stressed by Kant had become nothing less than a scandal to Reason. As Hegel declared polemically in the Science of Logic (1812; 1816): “The Kantian philosophy becomes a pillow for intellectual sloth, which soothes itself with the idea that everything has been already proved and done with.” Hegel’s major works, including, in addition to the Science of Logic, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and the Philosophy of Right (1821), all contain detailed and powerful rejoinders to Kantian conceptions of knowledge, truth, and freedom.

For Hegel the challenge was to articulate a philosophy that went beyond Kant without regressing behind him, without relapsing into dogmatic metaphysics. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel undertook a genuinely novel approach to the problem of knowledge, tracing the immanent movement of the “shapes of consciousness”—the different historical conceptions of knowledge—from “sense certainty” through “perception,” “force,” “consciousness,” “self-consciousness,” “reason,” “spirit,” and finally “absolute knowing.” At the final stage, “otherness” has been eliminated, and consciousness has reached the plane of unconditional truth. At this point a conception of knowledge is obtained—which Hegel called the Begriff, or idea—that is free of the aforementioned Kantian oppositions and thus suitable for producing a “first philosophy”: a doctrine of essences that accurately captures the rational structure of reality. No longer limited, as with Kant, to knowledge of appearances, consciousness is at last able to obtain genuine knowledge of the way things truly are.

Announcing his philosophical program in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel declared that “substance must become subject.” This terse formula characterized one of his main philosophical goals: to reconcile classical and modern philosophy. In Hegel’s view, Greek philosophy had attained an adequate notion of substance yet for historical reasons had fallen short of the modern concept of subjectivity. Conversely, modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, appreciated the value of subjectivity as a philosophical starting point but failed to develop an adequate notion of objective truth. Hegel’s philosophy sought to combine the virtues of both approaches by linking ontology (the philosophical study of being, or existence) and epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge).

At the same time, Hegel believed that by embracing subjectivity Kant and other modern philosophers had prematurely abandoned the claims of ontology. By making truth inordinately dependent on the standpoint of the knowing subject, they failed to give “essence,” or the intrinsic nature of objective reality, its due. Consequently, their philosophies were tainted by “subjectivism.” In Kant’s case, this defect was evident not only in his conclusion that phenomena are the only possible objects of knowledge but also in the solipsistic implications of his moral doctrine, which posited mutually isolated subjects who formulate universal laws valid for all moral agents. The Kantian moral subject, which prized autonomy above all else, radically devalued habit, custom, and tradition—what Hegel described as substantial ethical life, or Sittlichkeit. In Hegel’s view, these modern approaches placed a burden on the idea of subjectivity that was more than the concept could bear. In this regard as well, Hegel sought a compromise between modernity’s extreme devaluation of tradition and the elements of rootedness and continuity that it could provide, thereby preventing the autonomous subject from spinning out of control as it were.

Hegel thought that he discerned the disastrous consequences of such willfulness in the rise of bourgeois society—which he perceived, following Thomas Hobbes, as a competitive “war of all against all”—and in the despotic outcome of the French Revolution. Because bourgeois society, whose doctrine of “rights” had elevated the modern subject to a virtual absolute, gave unfettered rein to individual liberty, it invited anarchy, with tyranny as the only stopgap. Hegel held Kant’s philosophy to be the consummate expression of this modern standpoint, with all its debilities and risks. Consequently, in his political philosophy Hegel argued that substantial ethical life resided in the state. In his view, the state alone was capable of reconciling the antagonisms and contradictions of bourgeois society. The quietistic (if not reactionary) implications of his political thought were epitomized by his famous declaration in the Philosophy of Right that “what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.”

Moreover, it became increasingly difficult for Hegel’s followers to defend his later philosophy against the charge of having regressed to a pre-Kantian metaphysical dogmatism. In the Science of Logic, Hegel presumptuously claimed that his treatise contained “the thoughts of God before He created the world.” Later critics would strongly object to his “pan-logism”—his a priori assumption that the categories of reason necessarily underlay the whole of reality, or being. Although Hegel optimistically proclaimed that history demonstrated “progress in the consciousness of freedom,” his doctrine of the “cunning of reason”— according to which the aims of the World Spirit are willy-nilly realized behind the backs of individual actors—appeared to justify misery and injustice in the world as part of a larger plan visible only to Hegel himself (seeevil, problem of). “History,” he observed unapologetically, is “the slaughter-bench on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed.”

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